Its namesake, an abbreviation of its total height (850), System85 is designed to be both awkward and comfortable in its setting and placement. With an unusually small descender length and unconventional width, the type replicates its parentage in tight vertical line spacing as well as be a homage to the early system default Grotesks found on Windows 3.1, 95–XP, with particular attention paid to the pan-asian variants, of which the default System fonts are used extensively in Japan.

Spanning two master families, Proportional and Mono, System85’s core design is shared across a consistent weighting and styling, with juxtaposed combinations of serifs and straight forms, alongside grade-spaced corresponding Italics. The Mono family contains an extensive set of box drawing tools and stylistically associated arrows. By combining two unicode blocks into a singular entity, this allows the integration of both blocks to be exchanged, interchanged and connected together.